Jerome Rothenberg: from 'A Seneca Journal': 'Midwinter'

[No longer readily available, this section of A Seneca Journal was an early attempt of mine toward a poetry of minimal means — observations & off-the-cuff translations during my first viewing of the Seneca Indian Midwinter ceremonies at the Allegany Seneca reservation in western New York State. While I’ve intercalated much of A Seneca Journal in later gatherings of my poetry I was never able to provide an alternative place for these poems, though I still find them crucial to the work that was then unfolding for myself & others. At this later point in my life they present me with a kind of personal dreamtime, a little mysterious in retrospect & in no sense the true Seneca story as such, but vital to me in figuring what it means, both then & now, to be living in a state-of-poetry.]

A man who was a crow was traveling. He didn’t know where he had come from or which way he was going. As he moved along he kept on thinking: “How did I come to be alive? Where did I come from? Where am I going?”

going walkingin the middle of the rooma gardenI was alonewe all came back& sat here

MIDWINTER MEMORY

Green Corn

SONG

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*I*love*my************world*

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*I*love*my*************time*

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*I*love*my*growing*children*

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*I*love*my*******old*people*

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*I*love*my*******ceremonies*

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PRAYER EVENT

dancing

OBSOLETE QUESTIONS

who’s got an old dream?

•

who’s got a new dream?

•

who’s got a white dog?

DREAM EVENT (1)

See something in a dream & tell it as a riddle.

Let someone guess the riddle, let him give the object as a gift.

DREAM EVENT (2)

Act out a dream.

Let everybody’s brains turn upside down.

THE PUMPKIN

has a lake inside it

THE BEADS

seen in my eyes –

with many colors

* dream-guessing riddles

MIDWINTER

when I cough

THE ANCESTORS

Handsome

Lake

•

Happy Hoolihan

CONCLUSION

it was all I could do

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it was all I had learned

•

it was all that there was

[N.B. A special boxed edition of Seneca Journal: Midwinter, “with objects & collages by the author & Philip Sultz,” was published by Singing Bone Press, St. Louis, in 1975. The cover of that edition appears above.]

ABOUT POEMS AND POETICS: In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

Technicians of the Sacred, August 2017Expanded Fiftieth Anniversary EditionUniversity of California Press

* The index below is organized chronoloigally, starting with a post from May 20, 2012, when Poems and Poetics first appeared in Jacket2. Earlier posts in the series, going back to 2008, may be found at Poems and Poetics.